Friday, 5 October 2012

Farmer's Wife. Continued.

I am still plugging away at my Farmer's Wife Quilt. I actually have three more
blocks to piece together, but have already begun putting together the
quilt top itself. To some, it may be a haphazard way to work, but I am
more inspired by the visuals of putting it together. This way I can amend
the last of the colors I will be adding to this mix. Also, I have been
studying away for my degree and it is taking double the time I thought
it would take during the day, so there are fewer hours left for sewing.

Tall Pine Tree

The FW Quilt is spreading like wildfire throughout the online sewing community. I'm happy to say that I've been part of the torch relay and a new group has started up a sew-along on Threadbias. If you're thinking about trying it, I would highly recommended
participating or at least referencing this group. There were a lot of
bumps in the road that I had to just figure out myself, and it's so much
better to learn from someone else's mistake rather than have to pull
out the seam ripper!

Two types of settings that will alternate

To include here what I mentioned on the group forum, I will say that I had a lot of trouble on block size consistency,
no matter how careful I was. I will take some hits for shaving too close
to the template paper, etc, but in the end I felt like some templates were
slightly off (again, as someone mentioned, maybe it was my printer).
Also, I found some template repeats - my number 3 was equal to my number
12. And some blocks I found I could piece by eye after a while!

This is called Waste Not - but I prefer Ninja Star!

Wedding Ring

Wild Geeese

In
the end, if you find your blocks are slightly too big or too small, you
may not need to worry if your sashing is forgiving. For example, since
I'm alternating squares by putting every other on "on-point," I have
some leeway there. I was also able to make adjustments in the seam
allowances for my blocks that ended up a half inch or so too small. My
final block size is 8.5 inches with the background fabric sewn on.

These would make cool wall-hangings themselves..

Now I just have to make a decision on how I'm going to put together the back, and how I will quilt it. By hand? By machine? Maybe a combo? And what design? I want something simple, but also something that I haven't done before. I hope I can have this quilt finished by Thanksgiving! There, now I have a deadline - let's see if I can meet it!